Raitt apologizes; now it's the opposition's turn$1:
Nothing in the leaked conversation points to a minister looking for cover or a possible scapegoat, should her mission fail, and there are no indications that Raitt feels that she may be in over her head. On the contrary.
All of the above are positive traits, signs of intelligent life at the federal cabinet table and the trademarks of a promising ministerial activist.
Consider the unfortunate sequence of events she had to engage to make this story happen. She had to accidently record the conversation at a particularly queasy moment, lose the tape recorder in a washroom, have it found by a reporter, repeatedly refuse to pick it up for five months and then fight for a publication ban against the gift-wrapped story her tape recorder had delivered.
Honestly, I think she is a Liberal plant if it wasn't for the fact she was so earnest if not in the apology but in her no holds barred stance on politics itself.